Sociology by Ken Plummer

Author:Ken Plummer [Ken Plummer]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781317403630
Publisher: Routledge

6 Develop an Awareness of History and Time: How Can We Connect the Pasts, Presents and Futures of Human Social Life in the Flow of Time?

The social always has a past, a present and a future and it is always on the move. Whether studying migration, music or mass movements, sociologists will want to understand their histories, the way they are lived dynamically in the here and now, and ultimately sense their movements and where they might be heading (though they are not futurologists – the future can never be known). ‘The social’ is always on the go!

All social things have a past, and sociology has to examine their history, archaeology and genealogy. More than this, the past is plural and ever present in the moment – there is the perpetual haunting of all social things in their multiplicities. Avery Gordon’s Ghostly Matters (2008) shows how centuries of racial oppression in the US live on as ghosts in the present. More, this history is both big and bold and small and trickling. Major studies have been done on the histories of nation-states (in the work, for example, of Michael Mann on genocide and Charles Tilley on social movements) but also in the smaller histories of every damned thing – the social histories of toilets, telephones and tomatoes! Look at the social things of the present and examine how they are haunted by the past. The past itself is always constructed in the present moment, which then itself turns back into a lost past, even as both anticipate a future.

And this raises the complexity of time. There is, as we would expect, a sociology of time which looks at the whole shaping of ‘the temporal order’. Time is not simply ‘natural’ and given but a very problematical humanly produced thing too. We have not always had clocks, and they are not all the same across the world. Yet once they were invented, they arguably changed the way we live in a significant way. (Yes, there is a sociology of the clock and time maps too; see Zerubavel, 2003.) A sociology of time looks at the ways in which we construct our sense of time: objectively through clocks and various measures, but also subjectively – how we experience the daily flow of time (the phenomenology of time, as we say) and indeed construct our memories (social memories) of the past. Memory in sociology cannot be seen as simply an individual psychological trait but rather as something that is partially structured by the groups we are moving in. Memory is collective.

Part of this time movement is organized through the idea of ‘generations’. All lives are organized through specific age cohorts: those born in the Thatcher/Reagan years, or who lived through the Rwandan genocide, or who grew up during the Chinese Revolution, or who were survivors of the Holocaust: all share common experiences which bond them together. And these are unique to their lives, anchoring their lives as they move through them. Generational lives

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